Tag: tucson

Today was a good conference day. We started with an opening plenary session with Rebecca Mercuri, who spoke on the importance of transparancy in systems, and how it releated to electronic voting. This was followed by the classic papers sessions, where we got to revisit the history of the Orange Book, as well as the vulnerabilities in TCP/IP. The afternoon (for me) was more administrative: a conference board meeting, and a meeting with some people from the DoD with whom I work.

This evening was the conference dinner, which was excellent! Yummy. We got to give away a bunch of books, including a copy of a book on .NET Security to Steve Bellovin, one of the key authors of Unix! Sometimes, God has a sense of irony.

Tomorrow is the last day of the conference. We’ll have the final sessions, pack up. Then there will be the conference event: A trip to the Pima Air Museum and the Airplane Graveyard. Cool, for a transit-geek like me!

The second day of the conference has been going well. The tutorials were all well received, as was the workshop. We even had the press show up, in the form of a reporter and a cameraman from KOLD, the CBS affiliate. We told them to come back tomorrow to see Steve Lipner of Microsoft, or Thursday to hear Rebecca Mercuri. It appears they will. We did give them some excellent parting gifts, including a conference program, proceedings, and an ACySACy. This is the first year we’ve had a member of the media show up!

Tomorrow the primary conference starts. I get to give my plenary talk and introduce the speakers. No fair calling my cell phone just as I make the announcement to turn off your cell phones! I also get to listen to the best paper candidates.

S&F helped at registration this morning, and then went off with gf_guruilla, Dee (a past conference chair), and Ruth (the wife of a tutorial instructor) to hit the quilt shops. Yes, my wife did bring her new sewing machine to Tucson! This evening is the speakers reception, and then my family and a bunch of coworkers are going somewhere for dinner.

One sad observation on the news. CNN is reporting that Mary Travers of Peter, Paul, and Mary has leukemia. They indicated it is under treatment and she is expected to fully recover. This is good news, and I hope she heals quickly. I do have to say that CNN picked one of the worst pictures I’ve ever seen of Mary to post.

Update on what I wrote last night about wireless access. As I noted before, this hotel (Hilton El Conquistador, Tucson, AZ) has only wireless access in hotel rooms. Well, my laptop doesn’t have a wireless card. However, they do have a wireless kit, which consists of a bridge device (in comes the wireless, out goes the RJ45). So, I get the kit. The bridge has three lights: Power, ACT, and LINK.

Here’s the problem. When the computer starts booting, all three lights are on (yes, it is plugging into the laptops RJ45). Through the “Starting Windows”, all three stay one. Half-way through booting Windows 2000, the LINK light goes out, and the computer can’t see the network.

Does anyone have some ideas, so I don’t have to spend my evenings in the business center?

So far, the conference is going well. We’re halfway through the first day of tutorials. Attendance is down from last year, but talking to our registration person, this seems to be a common trend among conferences. No major snafus yet (such as two years ago where I was deathly sick the first two days), and S&F has really grown up and is doing a reasonably good job helping at registration. She’s now with mom, and they are going to go off to a museum. Later in the week, it is Kitt Peak Observatory for them.

Me, I’m just making sure things are running smoothly, and solving the life and death issues of whether someone gets something when they didn’t pay for it, or that the hotel doesn’t charge too much (and they do try). Content is going well.

I’ll play some with the wireless setup this evening. The hotel saved themselves the trouble of hardwiring  by putting wireless transcievers on the roofs of the rooms. Thus, I need a bridge that converts wireless to wired, as I don’t have a wireless card. They also appear to have two LANs, one for the guest rooms, and one for the meeting rooms. Naturally, there are distinct charges for each. The fancier the hotel, the more the number of distinct charges!

Other than that, not much is happening. The drive out was interesting; it is always neat so see the older highway that has been bypassed. In this case, it was the bypass of US 80 by I-8. We may return a day sooner, so that we can overnight in Blythe.